Tips to help you organise your home and office

Here are a few top tips on how to reduce your stress levels by getting your home and office life organised. Once implemented, you should have lots more time to enjoy yourself.

Don't procrastinate, start today

File regularly, do the laundry more often or weed the garden whenever you can. Do this for a week or so and soon it will be routine and the ‘piles’ of chores will be banished leaving you with time to enjoy yourself.

Home life

Family communication

To prevent clashes in schedules and missing important events, set up a message system that your family can adopt.

This can either be in the form of a magnetic board on the fridge or clipboards for each member of the family in the home office – whatever works for your family.

While it may seem unfeeling to communicate through a message board, it will save you the stress of finding out, at 8pm that you have to supply goodies for cake and candy the next day.

Organise your space, clear your mind

Make tasks part of your routine

If you procrastinate you’ll soon have a huge pile of tasks awaiting your attention. So wave your magic wand daily and the pile won’t be insurmountable.

File regularly, do the laundry more often or weed the garden whenever you can. Do this for a week or so and soon it will be routine and the ‘piles’ of chores will be banished leaving you with time to enjoy yourself.

Office life

Sort through your piles of paper and discard all old, outdated or irrelevant documents.

Steps to organise your paperwork

1. Sort through your piles of paper and discard all old, outdated or irrelevant documents.

2. The ‘archive’ papers shouldn’t just be dumped in a box either. Label these carefully and if you have large amounts of paper requiring archiving, get this scanned and converted to electronic format.

3. Paperwork that needs action should be divided into piles – accounts to pay, letters to mail, respond to or papers to file.

5. Now these need to be filed either into individual ring binders or into the filing cabinet - you can colour code if you prefer but these need to be labeled. Remember, if a two year old can find it, then you should be able to too.

6. Thereafter, you need to maintain this system otherwise it just falls apart again.

If you get hundreds of emails a week, create folders that you can move your emails to - action, current, meeting. Name your folders logically so that you don’t waste time searching for items.

Importance of electronic filing

If you get hundreds of emails a week, create folders that you can move your emails to - action, current, meeting. Name your folders logically so that you don’t waste time searching for items.

To keep your workspace decluttered and organised, spend five minutes straightening everything up at the end of your day. It doesn’t have to be perfect. This is one of the best ways to ensure that you’re able to be as productive as possible as soon as you start your work day.